Hacker pleads guilty to attacking anti-phishing group
A Fairfield, California, hacker has pleaded guilty to launching a Valentine's Day 2007 computer attack that nearly knocked an anti-phishing Web site offline.
Gregory King, 21, pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court to two counts of "transmitting code to cause damage to a protected computer," for launching distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against the Castlecops anti-phishing Web site and Killanet, an online forum for gamers and graphic designers.
He was arrested on Oct. 1 as part of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Operation Bot Roast. As agents knocked on his door, King stashed his laptop computer in his backyard, but it was eventually recovered, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ).
Killanet was attacked between 2004 and 2006 by King's botnet of about 7,000 hacked computers, the DoJ said in a statement.
Castlecops Castlecops notice that its attack reached a peak strength of 969M bps. If the volunteer-run organization had been charged for all that bandwidth, it would have had to close shop, the group said.
Castlecops collects information on phishing attacks and works with law enforcement to thwart the attacks.
King's plea agreement calls for a two-year prison sentence. He is set to be sentenced on Sept. 3 by United States District Judge Lawrence Karlton.
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True crime: The botnet barons 04 January, 2008 07:03:57
Two weeks ago, the feds revealed the names of eight people who had used botnets to engage in nefarious activity. Here are their storiesWhen federal agents announced on November 29 that they'd indicted or convicted eight individuals accused of using botnets (networks of computers infected with Trojan horse applications) to engage in criminal activity, the press release barely explained the nature and extent of the men's crimes -- or the investigations that led to arrests in an operation the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have termed Bot Roast II. - +
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Bad breaches, ghastly gaffes and five people we'd like to forgetHow bad was 2007 for breaches, vulnerabilities and similar mayhem? On the bright side, it was better than 2008 is forecast to be. With more of every sort of meltdown predicted -- more criminalization of the hacker community, more Web-application attacks, more phishing, more spamming, more zero-day attacks and more virtualization-related threats -- we're happy to tell you that you are likely to look back on 2007 as the peaceful old days. - +
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Initiative against zombie herders seeing success in the US and abroadThe FBI on Thursday announced that eight individuals have been indicted, pled guilty or have been sentenced to prison over the last few months for crimes related to botnet activity.
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